Page 361 - Asterisk™: The Future of Telephony

Presence information for emergency services
One of the characteristics of a traditional PSTN circuit is that it is always in the
same location. This is very helpful to emergency services, as they can pinpoint the
location of a caller by identifying the address of the circuit from which the call was
placed. The proliferation of cell phones has made this much more difficult to ach-
ieve, since a cell phone does not have a known address. A cell phone can be plugged
into any network and can register to any server. If the phone does not identify its
physical location, an emergency call from it will provide no clue as to the where
the caller is. VoIP creates similar challenges.
Call monitoring for law enforcement agencies
Law enforcement agencies have always been able to obtain wiretaps on traditional
circuit-switched telephone lines. While regulations are being enacted that are de-
signed to achieve the same end on the network, the technical challenge of delivering
this functionality will probably never be completely solved. People value their pri-
vacy, and the more governments want to stifle it, the more effort will be put toward
maintaining it.
Anti-monopolistic practices
These practices are already being seen in the U.S., with fines being levied against
network providers who attempt to filter traffic based on content.
When it comes to regulation, Asterisk is both a saint and a devil: a saint because it feeds
the poor, and a devil because it empowers the phrackers and spammers like nothing
ever has. The regulation of open source telephony may in part be determined by how
well the community regulates itself. Concepts such as DUNDi, which incorporate anti-
spam processes, are an excellent start. On the other hand, concepts such as Caller ID-
spoofing are ripe with opportunities for abuse.

Quality of service
Due to the best-effort reality of the TCP/IP-based Internet, it is not yet known how well
increasing realtime VoIP traffic will affect overall network performance. Currently,
there is so much excess bandwidth in the backbone that best-effort delivery is generally
quite good indeed. Still, it has been proven time and time again that whenever we are
provided with more bandwidth, we figure out a way to use it up. The 1 MB DSL con-
nection undreamt of five years ago is now barely adequate.
†
Perhaps a corollary of Moore’s Law will apply to network bandwidth. QoS may be-
come moot, due to the network’s ability to deliver adequate performance without any
special processing. Organizations that require higher levels of reliability may elect to
pay a premium for a higher grade of service. Perhaps the era of paying by the minute
for long-distance connections will give way to paying by the millisecond for guaranteed
low latency, or by the percentage point for reduced packet loss. Premium services will

† Gordon Moore wrote a paper in 1965 that predicted the doubling of transistors on a processor every few years.

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